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Top 5 Money Saving AdWords Tips

Don’t let your ad budget balloon out of control. Learn the top five tips to running cost-effective Google AdWords campaigns – strategies you can implement today and reap the savings and performance benefits from tomorrow. Elizabeth Marsten runs down her top five tips in this quick five-minute tutorial.

These are some methods you can go into your AdWords account right now, and apply. And see a significant difference in performance, in a positive way of course. First up, you’ve got to separate the search and display networks at the campaign level. Search means that someone typed into a search box, and hit Go. Display means that your ad is showing alongside content on a webpage, like an ad in a magazine.

Each network behaves differently, and has different definitions of success, and their quality scores are calculated differently. So, do yourself a favor, and never do this. Always separate them. It’s the number one place, I see people waste the most money, hands down. So what’s that look like? If you go into your Google AdWords account, open any campaign, open the settings tab, and here under type, click edit and you can see whether or not you have your search network only displayed, or search network with display select.

In this case, you want to separate them, so search network only. And hit Save. You’re good to go. Our next one, is to use mobile bid modifiers. By default, mobile devices inherit the bid, that you set for the ad group, unless you change it, after you save a new ad group. The setup wizard conveniently leaves this little detail out. If your site looks awful on a mobile phone, or doesn’t convert well. You want to at the very least, lessen the amount of the bid, or turn it off completely. Let me show you how to do that. To change your mobile bin modifier. Simply open a campaign. Open one of your ad groups, and click settings.

See this gray button here, that says devices? Click that. And it’ll show you computers, mobile devices with full browsers and tablets with full browsers. Go over here, to the bit adjustment column, to change that. Choose from the drop down > Decrease by, and put in 100%. What this will do, is essentially opt us out of showing ads, on mobile devices. If you wan to be on mobile, but just not to the tune of the full-fledged bid, at the ad group level, put a different number in, say like 50, for 50%, to bid half as much. In this case, we’re going to go ahead and leave it as 100.

Click Save, and there you have it, a mobile bid modifier. So, excellent. What’s the number three tip? Send visitors to a relevant landing page, not just the home page. If someone came to your site, on the keyword dog collars, then you should drop them off on a dog collar category, or product page, for goodness sake. You wouldn’t like it if you drove all the way to the store, and asked where the maple syrup was, and the store clerk just said, thanks for coming in. It’s here somewhere. Best of luck to you. Do that, and you can just watch your page search clicks get wasted, as people bounce back, to the search engine results page, in the hunt for their elusive item.

Our next tip, is to focus your spend, rather than spreading it too thin. You can’t buy, all of the keywords all of the time, you just can’t. So, let’s take a look at what that looks like, in a Google AdWords account. Go to your campaigns, and here, I’ve set up, the unfortunate situation of what it looks like, to spread your budget too thin. Taking your budget, and splitting it across multiple campaigns, say, with $5 here, $3 here, maybe $10 here, is a sure-fire recipe, for frustration and tears. Focus your budget. Spend the money where it matters.

Cut out keywords that are not working, you just have to. Alright, the last one has to be good, so, what is it? My next and final tip, is I want you to enable conversion tracking. Pease do this. Please. If you can’t track at the very least what keywords brought a sale, even if you don’t know the amount of the sale. You might as well throw your money down a well, and make a wish. The attribution method is pretty much the same. So, let’s walk through how to do that, in Google AdWords. From here, click the tools tab, and hit select conversions. Click the red, add new conversion button, and name your conversion.

Something like. Sales, or transactions is a good idea. Your source, is going to be a web page. Like your thank you page, your receipt page, or your submission received page. Could be a call on site, a mobile or tablet app download as well, or you can import. For the purposes of this tip, we’re going to go with the webpage. So, hit Save and continue. Here, we’re going to choose, our conversion category. In this case, we’ve gone with a purchase and sale. Here we’re going to set our conversion window. If you know that your sales cycle, is shorter or longer than 30 days, feel free to change that here. Otherwise, you can leave it as the default.

From here, if you don’t know your size markup language, you’ll need to ask your developer. But by default, you could probably leave it as HTML. Conversion value. You happen to sell one thing, you could enter that amount here. Otherwise, it’s optional, and you should leave it blank. Your tracking indicator, is actually something, that people don’t see on average, however, it is required. You can choose a single line or a two line layout, but if your site’s background, isn’t white, you might want to change it here, so that it blends in more seamlessly. From here, we’re going to hit Save and continue. Now, if someone else makes the changes to your code on your website, you can click this button here, enter their email address, and it will email them this block of code.

If it’s you that makes the changes, click the, I make the changes to the code button, here. Now, you have your block of conversion data code. You can paste this in, between the body tags on the receipt page, thank you page or submission receive page. Then, hit Done. Now, you can see there are sales transaction conversions here, the source’s web page, the categories of purchase or sale, because we haven’t actually installed the code on our website yet. These were just a few quick tips, to get you on the right track, with your Google AdWords efforts.

If you’d like to learn more, be sure to check out PPC Fundamentals with me, Elizabeth Marsten here on lynda.com.

Tips for AdWords Beginners

When you’re first starting out with AdWords there are so many things you need to know and understand that it’s almost impossible to grasp them all.

To help you get started with your new AdWords campaign I’ve written a list of all the helpful knowledge that I have compiled over the years. Granted, all these tips are not necessarily beginner friendly, but they’re good to know and you will one day find out why you needed to know them.

Ad Copy

It’s Not Just About One Metric

When optimizing your AdWords Ad Copy it can be dangerous to look at only one of the key metrics:

CTR

Clicks

Conversions

Conversion Rate

Cost Per Conversion

Avg. Conversion Value

If for instance you only look at CTR, then you will focus on the ads that draw in a lot of clicks. Many of my ad tests have shown that the ads having the highest CTR don’t necessarily have the best conversion rates.

To make sure you get conversions, you need to analyze your main metrics and detract the users who won’t be paying the price of your product or who are unable to get it delivered.

You need to take all the main metrics into account and get a great balance between high click volume, high CTR and conversions at a profitable cost per conversion.

Relevance is The Key

Working with AdWords is all about relevance. CTR (The percentage of people that click your ads, divided by the amount of people who see it) is the key metric that determines whether or not your AdWords Ads are relevant.

Remember a Call-To-Action

A Call-To-Action is something that you’re asking the user to do. It’s a term that you’ll hear a lot in online advertising.

Some of the most popular Call-To-Actions in AdWords ads are:

Call Today!

Order Now

Get Your Free Estimate

Book Your Trip

See Pictures and…

Find Out Why We’re Best

Buy Online for Only…

Contact Us Today

Claim Your Promotion

Search for your … here

Including a Call-To-Action serves two purposes:

You direct the users to perform a specific action on your website

The user knows exactly what he can do on your website. If the user is looking for info, then he won’t be likely to click an ad that reads “buy here”.

Use the Most Appropriate Landing Page

Ensuring high relevance between the search term and AdWords ad is just one part of the relevance game.

Once a user clicks on your ad you need to take control and make sure that they’re taken to a landing page that matches their query, where they can quickly locate all the necessary information they need.

Ad Extensions are Mandatory

Ad Extensions were first introduced in the late 2009 and have since become a crucial to increasing your ad space in SERP results and increasing your relevance.

Ad Extensions can be set up manually, or you added automatically to your account if you meet certain criteria.

The ad extensions we recommend small business owners to absolutely include in your campaigns are sitelinks and callout extensions.

Always remember to include Ad Extensions

Keywords

Don’t Use Broad Match

Broad match is the most commonly used match type in Google AdWords. It’s also the most volatile match type.

You have very little control over what search terms your ads are appearing for because your keywords may be accompanied by other random queries.

Looking through some of our Clients campaigns that have been using broad match keywords in the past, we found a lot of examples on how bad it can be.

It’s Not All About Long Tail Keywords

Don’t get me wrong – Long tail keywords can work great and creating a lot of content to catch the long tail searches for your organic campaigns is an amazing strategy, but with AdWords you can afford to think broader.

Video Annotations is a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos!

Use it to:

Add background information about the video

Create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene)

Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video

All of the above!

See how it work:

Embedded Video With Annotations, Bubbles, notes and link to channel and other video:

Video SEO recommendation for YouTube’s annotations feature

YouTube should treat annotations as indexable metadata, just like it does with the title, description and tags entry fields. After all, annotations are helpful text content that can improve a video’s relevancy to the viewer (similar to the description field), which is under the control of the account holder with permission-based controls for collaboration (so spam shouldn’t be an issue).

You control what the annotations say, where they appear on the video, and when they appear and disappear.

The annotations can also be coupled with subtitles (which can be translated into multiple languages by YouTube) to complement them and add more depth of information. Between the two of them you might not need to worry about sound and dialog any longer as you can subtitle everything and explain it, even pausing the video to give the viewer time to consume the information.

Annotations might be one of the best innovations in online video since the creation of the interactive button overlay. In fact they’re almost the same and not really new. But where Google and YouTube go, other follow

Annotations give you a way to offer far more information but still present it in a video format. Of course balancing the usage of the annotations so as not to overwhelm the video content or the viewer will be an art in and of itself.

How do I get started?

The Annotations Editor is a creator tool that lets you layer text, hotspots and links over your video, thus enriching experience with information, interactivity and engagement. This is a basic overview of how to access and use the Annotations Editor.
For a more advanced guide to help you get the most out of the Annotations Editor, look here.

Accessing the Annotations Editor

To access the Annotations Editor in the simplest way:

Sign in to your YouTube account and click your username located in the top right corner of any page.

From the drop down menu, select My Videos.

Next to the video you wish to edit, click the down arrow (on the right of the Insight button) and select Annotations

This will launch the Annotations Editor for the selected video.

Alternatively, you can launch the Annotations Editor from the video watching page by selecting annotations from the panel above the video player.

The video player – On the left side of the screen is the video player where you can play your video while also seeing the live annotations take effect. You can also use this display to alter the location of your annotations on the video.

The annotations timeline – On the bottom of the screen is where you can view and edit the timing of your annotations throughout the video, and also edit the timing as you like.

The annotations properties panel – On the right side of the screen is where you can edit the details of your annotations, such as the font size, color, duration, and also add links to other videos and websites.

For instructions on how to access your annotations page, please see article above.

To add an annotation, first move your cursor to the annotations properties panel on the right, and click Add annotation. You may select five different types of annotations:

for creating pop-up speech bubbles with text.

for highlighting areas in a video; when the user moves the mouse over these areas the text you enter will appear.

for creating pop-up boxes containing text.

for pausing the video for a length of time which you specify.

for creating a text overlay to title your video.

Once you have selected which type of annotation you want to insert, the following steps will allow you to fully customize the annotation:

You can move the annotation that you have created around the video player, customizing its location, or even changing its size and dimensions.

In the Annotations properties panel on the right, you can change the following properties of the text and annotation: Font size. Font color. Background color.Additionally, you can change the time period in which the annotation appears, and include links to other videos, playlists, channels, and subscription requests. Background color.

Once you finish customizing your annotation, be sure to save it and then publish whenever you like.

To edit an annotation, you can select it from the video player or the annotation timeline, and edit it in the panel on the right, or you can also click the Edit Existing Annotation tab on the right, and then selecting the annotation from the list.

Basic annotation editing functionality is available in the Annotations properties panel (right side). You can:

Change the annotation text by simply clicking on it and entering the desired text on the properties panel.

Drag the annotation to reposition it on the video.

Resize an annotation by adjusting the resize handles (small white squares that appear in the corner of annotations).

Change the speech bubble pointer location by dragging the resize handle that appears when you move the mouse over the annotation.

Change the location of a spotlight text by dragging it to the desired location.

Change the timing of the annotation in the annotations properties panel or dragging the edges of the annotation bar along the annotations timeline at the bottom of the editor:

The system will automatically save your work in draft mode every 30 seconds. If you want to save your work more often, click on the Save button at the top right of the annotations properties panel.

Other users won’t see your annotations until you publish them using the Publish button found at the top right of the annotations properties panel. The system will not automatically publish your annotations.

To delete an annotation, simply click the trash can in the right hand corner of the annotations properties panel.

Embedded Video With Annotations, Bubbles, notes and link to channel and other video:

What else should I know?

Annotations, once published, are shown by default. You can turn them off while watching a video through the player menu—just click the button on the bottom right of the video player.

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.Thomas J. Watson

Quotes on Failure

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.Winston Churchill

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.Albert Einstein

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.George Bernard Shaw

Quotes on Dreams

The mightiest works have been accomplished by men who have somehow kept their ability to dream great dreams.Walter Russell Bowie

Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.Leon J. Suenens

Dreams don’t work unless you do.John C. Maxwell

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.Christopher Reeve

If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.Walt Disney

Quotes on Happiness

It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation which give happiness.Thomas Jefferson

Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.Marquis De Condorcet

Think to Thank. In these three words are the finest capsule course for a happy marriage, formula for enduring friendship, and a pattern for personal happiness.Thomas S. Monson

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.Rita Mae Brown

The secret of Happiness is Freedom, and the secret of Freedom, Courage.Thucydides

Life’s truest happiness is found in friendships we make along the way.Unknown

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.George Santayana

Happiness will never come to those who fail to appreciate what they already have.Unknown

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotes on Attitude

Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.Carol Burnett

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.Aristotle

Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared; but only men of character are trusted.Unknown

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.Thomas Jefferson

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.Thomas Jefferson

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.Anais Nin

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Johann von Goethe

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give. Winston Churchill

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let not a man guards his dignity, but let his dignity guard him.Ralph Waldo Emerson

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end . . . I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.Abraham Lincoln

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”Walt Emerson

Wisdom Quotes

You can do anything, but not everything.

David Allen

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de SaintExupéry

The richest man is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.

Unknown Author

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.

Wayne Gretzky

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

Ambrose Redmoon

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Gandhi

When hungry, eat your rice; when tired, close your eyes. Fools may laugh at me, but wise men will know what I mean.

LinChi

The thirdrate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The secondrate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The firstrate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

A. A. Milne

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

Abraham Maslow

We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Aristotle

A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.

Baltasar Gracian

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

John Ruskin

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.

Marcel Proust

Work like you don’t need money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like no one’s watching

Unknown Author

Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not.

Virgil Garnett Thomson

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

Will Rogers

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.

Zig Ziglar

Funny Quotes

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.

John Wilmot

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.

Oscar Levant

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

Oscar Wilde

I’ve gone into hundreds of [fortuneteller’s parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.

New York City detective

When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.

Norm Crosby

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

Kurt Vonnegut

Just the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Carl Sagan

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.

Jean Rostand

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

Lily Tomlin

I quit therapy because my analyst was trying to help me behind my back.

Richard Lewis

We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.

Robert Wilensky

If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?

Scott Adams

If the lessons of history teach us anything it is that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.

Anon

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.

Clarence Darrow

Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else’s can shorten it.

Cullen Hightower

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.

Cyril Connolly

There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

Dick Cavett

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

H. L. Mencken

I don’t mind what Congress does, as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

Victor Hugo

I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Woody Allen

Intelligent Quotes

The person who reads too much and uses his brain too little will fall into lazy habits of thinking.

Albert Einstein

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

André Gide

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

I’d rather live with a good question than a bad answer.

Aryeh Frimer

We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.

Bill Vaughan

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.

Blaise Pascal

Don’t ever wrestle with a pig. You’ll both get dirty, but the pig will enjoy it.

Cale Yarborough

An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn’t take his education too seriously.

Charles F. Kettering

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Cyril Connolly

Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.

Dame Edna Everage

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

Edith Sitwell

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

Ellen Goodman

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Ellen Parr

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

Erica Jong

Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.

Gordon R. Dickson

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

Lily Tomlin

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.

Napoleon (Hanlon’s Razor)

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.

Oscar Wilde

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.